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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#121

Post by apexalpha »

fzaninotto wrote: post #64
fabiospampinato wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big/complicated are the functions Copilot is autocompleting for you? I'm thinking perhaps reading 10 potential candidates is actually slower and less instructive than trying to write the thing yourself.

It shows the suggestions line by line, and only shows the best guess. It's not more intrusive than Intellisense. You can actually see all the code blocks Copilot is thinking about if you want to, but that is indeed a distraction.

The animated example on https://copilot.github.com/ shows it suggesting entire blocks of code, though.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#122

Post by colesantiago »

kleiba wrote: post #39
colesantiago wrote: post #18

Gigantic caveat. > I agree to these additional telemetry terms as part of the technical preview

"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." Scott McNealy, CEO Sun Microsystems, 1999

Then, I should see absolutely zero complaints about privacy, tracking, spying, google analytics and facebook tracking.

Perhaps we should ask Scott if he is willing to share his browsing history, his personal photos and his passwords with the rest of us or maybe if I can come into his house?

After all, "You have zero privacy anyway"

Re: GitHub Copilot

#123

Post by Ensorceled »

fulafel wrote: post #73
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #59

This is very impressive! OpenAI’s tech opens an ethical Pandora’s box: 1. It’s clear that the raw inputs to all of OpenAI’s outputs originated with real, human creativity. 2. So, in a sense, OpenAI is laundering creativity. It reads in creative works, does complicated (and, yes, groundbreaking) transformations, and produces an output that is hard to trace to any particular source. 3. Yet, isn’t that effectively what…

What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Maybe unfair competition from having very good tools compared to other programmers, or havin irresponsibly shallow understanding of what the produced code does?

> What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box?

Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code?

It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ... and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs like food, housing and medical care.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#124

Post by aerovistae »

theden wrote: post #88

Calling it now, there will be a "Copilot considered harmful" post. If you need to go through the suggested code to ensure it's correct, you may as well write it yourself? If you glance at it and it looks about right, you can potentially overlook bugs or edge cases, you'll lose confidence in your own code since you didn't properly conceptualise it yourself. Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active exper…

> Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active experience of writing code.

And for those with experience, this will be obvious when reviewing their code. There's only two possibilities -- either copilot will get so good that it won't matter, or code written by copilot will have obvious tells and when someone is over-relying on it to cover up for a lack of knowledge, that will be very clear from repetition of the same sorts of mistakes.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#125

Post by tux1968 »

jonas_kgomo wrote: post #93
natfriedman wrote: post #60

Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.

This is obviously controversial, since we are thinking about how this could displace a large portion of developers. How do you see Copilot being more augmentative than disruptive to the developer ecosystem? Also, how you see it different from regular code completion tools like tabnine.

How many jobs have developers helped displace in business and industry? I don't think it's controversial that we become fair game for that same automation process we've been leading.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#126

Post by evgen »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #54
iwintermute wrote: post #21

So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?

My guess would be that the model itself (and the training process) could have different legal requirements compared to the code it generates. The code generated by the model is probably sufficiently transformative new work that wouldn't be GPL (it's "fair use"). I suspect there could be issues on the training side, using copyrighted data for training without any form of licensing. Typically ML researchers have a pret…

No, the code generated is what copyright law calls a derivative work and you should go ask Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams exactly how much slack the courts give for 'sufficiently transformative new work.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#127

Post by Hamuko »

natfriedman wrote: post #107
Asmod4n wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might this end up putting GPL code into projects with an incompatible license?

It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea... In terms of the permissibility of training on public code, the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. We are certain this…

>training ML models is fair use

How does that apply to countries where Fair Use is not a thing? As in, if you train a model on a fair use basis in the US and I start using the model somewhere else?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#128

Post by f38zf5vdt »

cqaz wrote: post #113

This is hardly grounds for celebration. Another step in Microsoft's efforts to drive down programmer salaries by expanding the work force. Also, this tool will enable more cheap LOC churn for those gaming performance reviews (not that this is currently difficult, but it will be even easier).

It will absolutely transform undergraduate education in computer science, or rather, the breadth of the workload. <:)

Re: GitHub Copilot

#129

Post by gugagore »

akersten wrote: post #67
dekhn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a model trained on text covered by a license is not itself covered by the license, unless it explicitly copies the text (you cannot copyright a "style").

Well, it probably is explicitly copying at least some subset of the source text - otherwise the code would be syntactically invalid, no?

I can't say what's happening in GitHub Copilot, but it's not necessarily true that the only way to produce syntactically valid outputs is to take substrings of the source text. It is possible to learn something approximating a generative grammar.

Take a look at https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

At the same time, I would not be surprised if there are outputs that do correspond to the source training data.

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